Legislation would have made child kidnapping a lesser crime until changed earlier this month

Feb. 19, 2014

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JEFFERSON CITY — A proposed change that would have made kidnapping children a lesser crime in Missouri was axed earlier this month after child advocates cried foul.

Lawmakers have been looking to revise Missouri’s criminal code for years and this year’s bill revising the code, Senate Bill 491, could be debated on the Senate floor at any time.

Currently, child kidnapping is a class A felony. One change initially proposed in the bill would have made the crime a class B felony when children older than 2 years old are taken.

Only kidnapping children under 2 years of age would have remained a class A felony under the proposal.

Emily Van Schenkhof, deputy director at Missouri Kids First, an organization that advocates against child abuse, said she opposed the change and spoke with Sen. Bob Dixon, R-Springfield, about it.

“I think we all understand that people don’t kidnap kids to do good things to them,” Van Schenkhof said. “We expressed our concerns about the reduction in penalty for child kidnapping and thankfully Sen. Dixon understood that that was not a change that he was going to support or that should be in the final bill.”

Asked about the rationale for originally changing the felony classification, Dixon’s chief of staff, Eric Jennings, directed questions to Jason Lamb, director of the Missouri Office of Prosecution Services.

Lamb did not immediately return a call requesting comment.

Senate Bill 491 is sponsored by Sen. Jolie Justus, D-Kansas City, though Dixon, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has worked extensively on the bill.

The bill as originally introduced in December made child kidnapping a class B felony if the child is older than 2. However, a substitute version of the bill introduced in the Judiciary Committee earlier this month changed the bill to erase the distinction between kidnapping a child under the age of 2 and over the age of 2.

According to Missouri law, a class A felony is punishable by no less than 10 years in prison and up to a maximum sentence of 30 years or a life sentence. For a class B felony, a prison term of between 5-15 years is allowed.

Under the proposed Senate criminal code revision, a person commits the crime of child kidnapping if he or she is not a relative of a child within three degrees and, while knowing he or she has no right to do so, removes a child under 14 from the place where the child is found without parental consent or confines the child for a substantial period of time without consent.

“Right now, there are no changes in child kidnapping and that is a very good thing,” Van Schenkhof said. “But that was something we worked on fairly significantly for the last two years convincing both the members of the House and Senate that this was not a change that they would want to do.”